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Drinking Water Photos

Disaster Water Distribution, Haiti

Photograph by Win McNamee/Getty Images

Desperate hands reach out for help as city workers distribute water after the catastrophic earthquake that rocked Haiti on January 12, 2010.

Despite international efforts, the citizens of Leogane and other Haitian communities remained desperately short of water in the quake’s aftermath. Experts warn that water-related diseases like cholera and dysentery will add to the quake’s already grim death toll.

Drinking Water, Ethiopia

Photograph by Peter Essick

Soti Sotiar slakes her thirst with water from a new well near Dimeka, Ethiopia. The lucky Sotiar is among only 10 to 20 percent of rural Ethiopians who enjoy access to clean drinking water.

Worldwide, about one in every seven people has no regular access to clean water—more than one billion people in all.

Gathering Water, Haiti

Photograph by Win McNamee/Getty Images

Women filling their water buckets at a public tap in Port-au-Prince are just a few of the 1.2 million people left homeless by the January 2010 earthquake that devastated Haiti. Finding potable water is a problem for those living in squalid camps, but it may not be their biggest concern. With no way to dispose of human waste, experts fear such communities will experience epidemic waterborne diseases like Cholera—particularly when the spring rainy season swamps makeshift latrine areas.

Waiting for Water, China

Photograph by Associated Press

Villagers queue for a chance to fill containers with fresh drinking water, delivered by truck to the dry villages of south China’s Guangdong Province.

In many parts of the world, where reliable natural water sources or permanent infrastructure are lacking, people depend on trucked water deliveries by governments or private entrepreneurs.

Water Truck, Pakistan

Photograph by Emilio Morenatti/AP

A Pakistani girl fills her cup from a water truck in the Shah Mansour refugee camp. During the summer of 2009 the girl and her family were among some three million people who fled regional fighting amid fears of a humanitarian crisis.

Conflicts have uprooted some 35 million people worldwide. Many are forced to live in areas with inadequate water supplies and poor sanitation.

Plastic Piping System, China

Photograph by Greg Girard

The residents of this Shanxi Province hillside in China enjoy fresh water in their homes, thanks to a communal well and a plastic piping system that delivers water to their doors.

Global water use has tripled since the 1950s, but new sources are difficult to find. While populations have climbed, Earth’s freshwater supplies have remained constant since the days of the dinosaurs.

Gathering Drinking Water, Bangladesh

Photograph by Karen Kasmauski

A Bangladeshi woman gathers drinking water for her family from a lake behind her home. Though the waters appear clear, they are likely laced with cholera-causing bacteria.

Waterborne diseases are a human-health crisis, particularly in the developing world. Some 5,000 children die each day of diarrheal disease alone—an average of one child every 20 seconds.

Water Delivery, Mexico City

Photograph by Dario Lopez-Mills/AP

Waiting for the water truck is a routine task for many of sprawling Mexico City’s 20 million residents. In this low-income neighborhood, like many not connected to the city’s municipal water system, a meager weekly ration is delivered by truck. Other neighborhoods have city water piped into their homes but see their taps turned on for only an hour per week.

Old, leaky pipes spill some 25 percent of the city’s precious water into the surrounding soils—even as growing demand continues to outstrip supply.

Outhouse, Bangladesh

Photograph by Karen Kasmauski

A Bengalese boy visits the outhouse—a major source of waterborne illness in poor communities worldwide.

Forty percent of the world’s population has no way to properly dispose of their own waste. Pathogenic bacteria from untreated human and animal waste often contaminates water used for drinking and food preparation and spawns illnesses like typhoid, which impacts some 17 million people each year.

Village Well, India

Photograph by Lynsey Addario

Villagers in Maharashtra, India, visit a well to gather water for drinking, cooking, and washing.

Women, and children, in much of the developing world bear the burden of walking to a water source, an average of 3.7 miles (6 kilometers) away, and hauling water back to their homes. A standard 5.25-gallon (20-liter) container weighs a crushing 44 pounds (20 kilograms), and the responsibility is often so time consuming it interferes with education and efforts to earn a living.

Water Tank in Baghdad, Iraq

Photograph by Karim Kadim/AP

Water brings smiles to Sadr City, an impoverished Baghdad neighborhood of two million Shiite Muslims in Iraq. In 2006 this home’s water tank was filled by a private contractor because area pumps were often disabled and broken pipes contaminated water with sewage.

The U.S. State Department estimated that only 5.5 million of Iraq’s 28 million people had regular access to potable water in the immediate postwar period. Reconstruction efforts, including a new treatment facility in Sadr City, had upped that number to more than 21 million by 2009.

Water Pump, Ghana

Photograph by Randy Olson

A Ghanaian woman works a village water pump and prepares to fill a lineup of containers. She is luckier than many—African women walk an average of 3.7 miles (6 kilometers) to reach the nearest well.

Water shortages and lack of sanitation facilities have afflicted about half of all Africans with some type of water-related disease, from infant diarrhea to cholera.

Drinking Water Distribution, India

Photograph by Lynsey Addario

The tap of a water truck is mobbed by India’s Untouchables and other resource-poor citizens.

Despite attempts at reforming India’s caste system, the Dalits are still denied many basic rights, including the ability to get water from wells used by other Indians.

In many parts of the developing world, the poorest must pay high prices to buy water, which is held in the hands of corrupt governments and private “water mafias.”